DateSunday 27 March 2005

Neil McIntosh picks up an interesting bit of screen-scraping with Google news sources revealed (but not by Google). As Google won’t say which sources its (manifestly flawed) news service uses, someone has decided to tot them up – which isn’t hard, just boring.

Meanwhile, bowing to pressure from bloggers, Google has removed two sources of hate speech – National Vanguard and National Zeitung – from its news services in the US and Germany, respectively. Internet News carries the story, along with Google’s fresh refusal to detail which sites are used, or how they’re judged fit for inclusion.

What’s interesting is how this reveals a typical problem with 24-hour media – or in Google’s case, 365x24x60x60-second media. It has to have fuel to feed the fire, or else the engine goes out. What! Google News hasn’t updated for 10 seconds! But the world has rotated (pauses, thinks of Christopher Eccleston reciting lines) 2.7 miles in that time! Something must have happened on this interweb thing!

The result: you rely on crummy news sources, and promote sites that have recently been updated above those which are actually authoritative. And thus media disappears up its own arse, chasing timeliness over content, promoting quantity over quality.